Kantata Cloud (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) provides project management and collaboration software for small to mid-sized professional services companies. Features include resource management, project dependencies, time and expense tracking, file sharing, versatile user permissions, private messaging, planning and reporting.
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Planview AdaptiveWork
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Planview AdaptiveWork is a web-based collaborative work management software. Planview AdaptiveWork enables users to connect employees and partners and create documents, reports and specialized workflow automation. Planview AdaptiveWork is designed to work across multiple teams to enable cross-company task, project, and resource management.
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Planview ChangePoint
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Planview Changepoint is a platform that marries professional services automation (PSA), project portfolio management (PPM) and business analytics to provide managers broad operational visibility and control over their strategic business portfolios.
Planview Clarizen empowers us to spend less time aggregating on and more time acting on the data get a clear picture of the current and future requirements and visualize the portfolio and pivot quickly with changing business needs. Great product that empowers teams to reach …
Clarizen's ease of use, ease of setup, out-of-the-box delivery, project management, and time management were the factors for choosing Clarizen. All were good products but we are happy to have selected Clarizen.
We've looked at tools to replace Clarizen, but we have customized Clarizen so much it would be difficult to transition to a new platform. Some of the features we appreciated in other tools we have looked at are built-in BI tools, improved financial reporting for projects, and …
Planview Changepoint helps us to understand our key customers enabling us to capitalize on every financial opportunity and helps us to forecast demand against the capacities required for new opportunities, and also it automates and monitors contractual terms and conditions. It …
It is appropriate and even exceeds expectations 90% of the time. It makes project tracking very easy and visually accessible for most cases. The only occasion where Mavenlink came slightly short was for a special project that required more interaction options among project members. I am certain there are ways to work around that issue, but we did not find them.
I've been an AdaptiveWork (Clarizen) admin for the past 14 years, so I've seen much improvement since I started working with the product. I'm very happy we can utilize the hybrid mode by using the cards, I think this was long overdue but it works very well.
Changepoint is basic and would, therefore, work for businesses with uncomplicated requests, pretty straightforward workflows and willingness to work with an unsightly solution. It is basic, from the UI to the search option and the way the information is captured, which can be frustrating and counter-intuitive at times. It is relatively robust (i.e. I have been using it for almost 2 years and have not seen it crash once) but it does log me out when the system has been inactive for about 30 minutes - and I am only notified about being logged out upon clicking the Submit button, meaning many a line of text have been typed more than once!
With Mavenlink when starting to assign tasks to people, set deadlines and milestones, and add files to our projects we can look at it all from a variety of perspectives, including a task tracker view and a Gantt chart view
Through Mavenlink each project also includes an activity stream where we can view all project details as they come up, as well as an activity feed for all the projects it is linked to.
Many ways to acclimate to the system; documentation, videos, community, and contacts.
Planview provides scalable customization options tailored to the unique needs of each business unit or department. Easily add or remove fields in the system. As the admin, it was easy to learn how to configure.
Offers flexibility to adapt to existing systems and align with organizational workflows and processes. There are multiple ways to customize each part of the system to meet our needs.
Changepoint has significant reporting capabilities, though of course, the data that comes out is only as good as the data that goes in. I enjoy being able to use the standard reports to understand exactly how much a project has cost us and to compare it to how much we are charging. This allows us to more accurately set our prices. Though we have not used the report designer capability, I understand that custom reports can be designed with relative ease.
Changepoint has a versioning capability for changes made to user profiles in the system manager, which I find particularly helpful. As a non-power user, it is valuable to be able to see what changes I have made to various profiles so that I can troubleshoot a problem down the line.
Changepoint has significant functionality well beyond the features that we are currently using, and for this reason, I think it is affordable and a good deal. Particularly if your organization is interested in dedicating the time and resources into using all of the features around project planning, resource allocation, etc., the price is well worth the value.
When it comes to reports, it would be great if there was an easy way to roll-up the results instead of having to create configurations to summarize data.
The consultant experience has not been great when it comes to more advanced needs for configurations. The consultants are in a different timezone which limits hours to work together and it seems hours are spent trying to determine what the requirement is and when the initial thought is that the configuration is possible, it may result in not being able to assist.
Charts in the reports section are not able to be exported
When pulling a report together, you need to make sure you pull from the right "item" or level. If you decide you need data that resides in another "item" or level, you need to re-do the report from the beginning.
Because the system is so configurable and I imagine different clients use the system differently, when you need something automated in your account, where you need to pull a consultant or SME in, the person doesn't necessarily understand your configurations and how things work so they are unable to give recommendations on how to solve problems that don't impact other configurations you already have set up in the system.
Templates cannot be updated unless they are pulled into a project and then re-saved. In the templates module, you are not able to open a template and edit to re-save. Therefore, making updates to a template can be very time consuming having to find a project to use to pull it in, make updates, re-save and then pull out. It would be great if the templates module allowed you to edit the templates and re-save.
We use Changepoint to manage the IS organization. I would like to see more advancement in order to do benefits management.
I would like to see a capability where a project manager can build a very detailed work breakdown structure, but only require project resources to charge time and provide a task status at a higher level.
Although the company I currently work for does not use the product I have recommended that we do switch to Mavenlink. We will be opening some new sites internationally this year and I can see that Mavenlink would be a great product for us to use
I give my renewal of this product a 9. It's only because we never know what product may come out next and how other factors in our office political environment may cause impact upon this. If I always had my way, this is what we'd settle on as our de facto project management system.
Sometimes the decision to renew boils down to an old adage "if it isn't broken don't fix it". Previous to moving to Changepoint, it was obvious that we needed a better project management tool. Projects we completed on time but the time zone difference between the teams and several iterations of back and forth caused a number of communication issues with projects. The difference is night and day.
I think Kantata is one of the most robust and best project management tools out there for an organization like ours. However, some of our staff feel like it isn't as user-friendly as it could be. From a Director point of view or a Project Manager point of view, Kantata is exceptional. From the point of view of a task-doer, it could be more visually appealing. Also, the mobile version isn't great.
It is easy to configure, intuitive. The customization process is in some ways better than Salesforce.com. It has a great UI. It does however depend on how it's implemented.
The design of it is generally fine, however the ability to data upload people from a spreadsheet is an obvious miss.
Sometimes it is slow when everyone is entering their time on Fridays or Mondays but other than that we rarely see downtime and maintenance notifications are well in advance.
Very good integration with Google apps. Some complexity is called however in the synchronization between Google Tasks and Maven links tasks. This can sometimes lead to duplicate records in Google Tasks. It has been dissolvable that becomes cumbersome if not properly curated.
Most Ancillary Pages: Quick to Reasonable (By "ancillary" I mean lesser used/master data maintenance pages - e.g. People, Customers, Individual Tasks, Milestones, etc.)
Work Plan (with 100 sub items): Reasonable to Slow
Kantata support is fantastic! Any issues that arise are always handled quickly and efficiently. Granted, we haven't had many issues to report. Typically, my team tends to only reach out to support if they need assistance remembering how to do something or asking about an improvement. We had Kantata build an integration when we first started using the software, and the support team worked hard to listen and improve the integration.
It's a good experience overall. Clarizen was useful when needed. It's mostly needed for advice on how to do more sophisticated actions or how to change something that was set up administratively. It's seldom used otherwise. The product consistently works, the documentation is acceptable, and the generally intuitive product is easy enough for most staff to pick up without much issue.
We prepared questions in advance, and our trainer was an expert in what Mavenlink was and wasn't able to do. We were able to have multiple people trained at once.
• We worked with a Project Manager on their side. He was very good about developing a project plan to hit our goal. I think we had weekly or twice weekly calls – very steady cadence over 3 month period. • Their PM skills were great – kept us on task. For the last week, they sent 2 people on site and they did training for power users. After that a couple of them revisited here
The training was very well-organized. We were able to send questions in advance so the instructor knew what to cover, and the brought up related topics to maximize the usefulness of what they were teaching us.
Our trainer, Alex, is exceptional and knows the product really well. I swear he must have wrote the product himself! His manner with training is very easy going, gives you homework that is applicable to what you need to learn and stages it correctly for you. It was a pleasure to be trained by him.
Dedicate as much internal time to the implementation effort as possible, even if you're using a 3rd party or Mavenlink services. Your team knows your processes the best
We have been able to implement AdaptiveWork pretty easily but it requires updating of resource availability and continuous training as roles change and new people join the company. Other documentation is used such as spreadsheets for longer range planning and project approval
We have since switched over to JIRA and let me tell you, it was probably the best decision we have made as a company. We chose Mavenlink based on promises from the sales team about future roadmap work that really never happened. We thought Mavenlink would easily integrate with our billing software but we couldn't have been more wrong. We ended up never utilizing Mavenlink invoices as they don't even allow you to fully customize your invoices that go out to clients!
Planview AdaptiveWork was the right size, at the right price point that fit our customization and integration flexibility. It is intuitive to use but allowed us to add complexity as our needs grew
Planview Changepoint helps us to understand our key customers enabling us to capitalize on every financial opportunity and helps us to forecast demand against the capacities required for new opportunities, and also it automates and monitors contractual terms and conditions. It gives us visibility into our employees' skills and helps to optimize resource allocation.
Manvenlink is perfect for showing expenses and income over time and across people.
Manvenlink is adaptable for the integration and automation of the processes of each of our projects in order to optimize resources and improve operational performance.
Mavenlink allows us to determine if our projects are profitable or not, as well as save significant time by automating components such as recurring tasks and having templates, among other things.
Manvenlink is advantageous for our operations due to its simple portfolio management of our projects: manage several projects at once and receive a complete perspective of the development of each one at a glance.
Manvenlink kindly provides us with robust discussion threads, access restrictions, and built-in document management, allowing us to contextualize communications.
By implementing Planview AdaptiveWork on a company-wide level, we have been able to remove the other project management tools we have been using and consolidate our costs for technology down to a single tool
The ability to incorporate cross-departmental work and communication has streamlined our project management processes to a point where we can work seamlessly together without interruption trying to consider the gaps between tools
Reporting capabilities from the unified tool has given our leadership insight and the ability to make strategic business decisions more effectively than ever
Employee efficiency has decreased significantly within our Project MAnagement team. The main causes are lack of logical steps/not user-friendly and the slowness of the entire program.
Changepoint PSA has greatly improved being able to track budgets for all projects. Before this software, budgets were done manually by hand and cross-referenced with Accounting. Now, we can pull a report out of the system, as long as all parties entered their time and data correctly.
